Last week I hit an interesting milestone… one I didn’t see coming. I didn’t aspire to it, and even after it happened, I wasn’t consciously thinking of it until… a couple of hours ago 😅 That’s when it hit me that something amazing had happened for the first time. See, last week, the CEO of a certain blogging platform reached out to me and asked about the cost of being listed in one of my blog posts. He wanted his platform to be the first in the list. I quoted him $2,000 for 150 words for 1 year. It was almost a joke quote. I wanted to see what would happen… He came back with a “It’s too much,” so I wrote back to say, “How about $1,000 for 150 words for 6 months?” (Slightly dramatized dialogue, but the numbers are real.) He said yes right away! 😂 So… I didn’t even reduce the price. I reduced the term from 1 year to 6 months, and he initiated the bank transfer right away. Milestone because I have never made $1,000 for 214 words (once I wrote the snippet, it ended up being 214 words)… and I only have to keep it on my site for 6 months… unless he renews it. That’s $4.67 per word… 😆 Power of building a platform and running it for 8+ years, eh?

I suck at negotiating, BUT! When I first pitched Justin on Monday... His first response (on Wed) was some version of... let's do a joint workshop for $250 + affiliate % And today (Fri), after some back-and-forth negotiations, we landed on a deal that's a total of $2,750 + affiliate commissions 😁 You can see my counteroffer details here... I asked for 4k for the whole bundle, fyi. So we went from $250 + Affiliate % from Justin's initial offer → $4k + affiliate % from me as my counteroffer → negotiations → $2.75k + affiliate % (final deal agreed by both parties). I'm off to prepare a contract and then get paid, hopefully by next week 😁😁😁 But... can't stop at that, can I? I promised 6 brands when I started this challenge, after all. Which is why, I'm about to start prepping to pitch the next brand over the weekend, so I can send the pitch on Monday. Stay tuned! (But yeah, looks like I'm one brand down. Strong start, I'd say 😁)

I made a bunch of videos last night at 3 AM... and I realize these could/should have been just audio files. But I don't know where to host audio files without a public feed or podcast-like sharing options... I will just embed them on my site (behind a paywall). Was looking at Zencastr. Does anyone have experience using that platform? Or anything else for what I'm trying to do?

I have nobody to share this news with, so whatever... imma share it here. My short story is apparently being typeset in Prairie Schooner's upcoming Winter 2026 issue right now :) The long silence has finally broken. Whewww. I was starting to wonder if this story would ever see the light of day. That's all 😊

Let's keep each other accountable and get it done! In my case... I have to finish writing October Field Notes for members... NO MATTER WHAT!!! Share yours 👇